Ruth 4:18-22

GENEALOGY OF DAVID, Ruth 4:18-22.

This genealogical table presents us with ten names, a round and even number; and this fact, taken in connexion with the well known love of the old Hebrews for a perfectly drawn, symmetrical family register, may at least suggest that some unimportant names have been designedly left out. This is most naturally to be supposed in a list that bridges over many hundred years. The position that every individual link in this ancestral chain, stretching back from David to Pharez, is given here, is an unwarrantable assumption, and utterly destitute of proof. We may, therefore, pass over without notice all questions of chronology which have been raised upon this genealogy. The passage appears again, with but trifling verbal differences, in Matthew’s genealogy of Christ, (Matthew 1:3-6,) so that from a lofty spiritual point of view we may look upon it as a carefully finished document, looking not to David only, but also to Messiah. It is a noticeable fact, and worthy of special mention here, that the first two genealogies of Genesis that of Cain (Genesis 4:17-22,) and that of Adam through Seth, (Genesis 5:1-29,) contain each precisely ten names.